A revised W3C Working Draft for the CSS Text Level 3 specification
has been released, updating the earlier draft of 2007-03-06. Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g., fonts,
colors, spacing) to Web documents. This CSS module has been produced as
a combined effort of the W3C Internationalization Activity, and the
Style Activity and is maintained by the CSS Working Group. It also
includes contributions made by participants in the XSL Working Group.

This Text module and a separate (upcoming) Writing Modes module replace
and obsolete the May 2003 CSS3 Text Module Candidate Recommendation.
Since this is a thorough overhaul of the previous CR, a list of changes
has been provided. Sections relating to bidirectional and vertical text
layout will be moved to a separate Writing Modes module. These features
may change greatly from the last revision, but they have not been
dropped. The text-script property has been dropped, since it does not
belong in the style layer. Controls over kerning have been moved to the
CSS Fonts Module...

Principal sections in the specification include Transforming Text
(transforms text for the styling purpose), White Space Processing, Line
Breaking and Word Boundaries, Text Wrapping, Alignment and Justification
(describes how inline contents of a block are horizontally aligned if
the contents do not completely fill the line box), Spacing (Word Spacing,
Tracking with the 'letter-spacing' property, Fullwidth Punctuation Kerning,
Adding space with the 'text-autospace' property), Edge Effects (indentation
and Hanging Punctuation, and Text Decoration.

As to White Space Processing: "The source text of a document often
contains formatting that is not relevant to the final rendering: for
example, breaking the source into segments (lines) for ease of editing
or adding white space characters such as tabs and spaces to indent the
source code. CSS white space processing allows the author to control
interpretation of such formatting: to preserve or collapse it away when
rendering the document... [For] Line Breaking and Word Boundaries: For
most scripts, in the absence of hyphenation a line break occurs only at
word boundaries. Many writing systems use spaces or punctuation to
explicitly separate words, and line break opportunities can be identified
by these characters; a lexical resource is [sometimes] needed to
correctly identify break points in such texts..."

"Is your home electricity meter the next device you have to worry about
getting hacked? Researchers at last week's IEEE SmartGridComm 2010
conference in Gaithersburg, MD., warned that as utilities transition
to greater use of smart grids, their increased two-way communication
would leave consumers and suppliers open to more forms of cyber attack.
In fact, by 2015, they estimated, the smart grid will offer up to
440 million potential points to be hacked.

Why mess with someone's home heating bill? One significant worry is
that intercepting and manipulating smart grid data could provide
attackers with the means to benefit financially... Beyond financial
remuneration, other leading attack scenarios include causing chaos,
studying consumers' usage patterns to determine when they're on vacation
and then burgling their house, or taking out sensitive facilities...

Another difficulty is that like SCADA systems, today's smart grid
systems may have a lifespan of 10 or 20 years. During that time, their
built-in security, if any, will become widely known and disseminated.
In other words, today's new smart grid meter could be 2030's
cyber-catastrophe, or at least give rise to some new variation on
Stuxnet.

Accordingly, numerous moves are afoot to help nail the security of
smart grids in their infancy. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology, notably, has been developing a framework for creating
interoperable as well as secure smart grids and related systems..."

On October 12, 2010, the IETF announced creation of a new Working
Group 'Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond Web (ABFAB)',
chartered to specify a federated identity mechanism for use by Internet
protocols not based on HTML/HTTP, such as for instance IMAP, XMPP,
SSH and NFS. The design will combine existing protocols, specifically
the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP - RFC 3748), Authentication,
Authorization and Account Protocols (RADIUS - RFC 2865 and Diameter
- RFC 3588), and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).
Federated identity facilitates the controlled sharing of information
about principals, commonly across organisational boundaries. This
avoids redundant registration of principals who operate in multiple
domains, reducing administrative overheads and improving usability
while addressing privacy-related concerns and regulatory and statutory
requirements of some jurisdictions." Two initial contributions have
been made to the new IETF WG.

It seems desirable to extend GSS-API naming extensions to support
concepts such as SAML names where the format is specified separately.
The format of GSS-API attribute names should be changed. If no space
character is found in the name, then the name is interpreted as a URI
describing the attribute. Otherwise, the portion from the beginning of
the buffer to the first space is interpreted as a URI describing the
form and interpretation of the rest of the buffer; this portion is
known as the attribute type URI..."

The second contributed Standards Track specification "A GSS-API
Mechanism for the Extensible Authentication Protocol" defines "protocols,
procedures, and conventions to be employed by peers implementing the
Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API) when
using the EAP mechanism... The goal of this specification is to
combine GSS-API's support for application protocols with EAP/AAA's
support for common credential types and for authenticating to a server
without requiring that server to specifically support the authentication
method in use. In addition, this specification supports the use of
the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to transport assertions
about attributes of client subjects to servers. Together this
combination will provide federated authentication and authorisation
for GSS-API applications..."

"A business process occurs when people interact in a coordinated manner
to achieve a common business goal. Work flows from one person to the
next, and each individual performs his or her own task or business role.
For example, consider a simple workflow for checking a customer into a
hotel. The receptionist books the room for the arriving guest. The
room-booking information travels to the housekeeping department and the
hotel's accountants. The housekeeping department ensures that the
customer finds the room ready, and the accountants keep a record of
the customer's payments.

Management of a business process is management of the flow of work.
Business process management (BPM) tools allow you to express workflows
in a way that lets computer systems understand them and act accordingly.
The old way of doing this is to write code in some programming language.
The BPM way is to do it administratively through configuration without
writing a single line of code, using BPM software. Business Process
Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard that lets you express a workflow's
business requirements graphically. You first use a BPMN workflow editor
to author the BPMN representation of your business process. Then you
host the BPMN representation on a BPMN workflow engine, which handles
the actual flow of work.

This two-part article introduces BPM concepts and shows the features of
Bonita Open Solution—a BPM engine that implements the Business
Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard. Part 1 discusses how various
BPMN elements work and start configuring an example business-process
workflow with Bonita. Part 2 completes the remaining configuration tasks
to implement the workflow... The article presents the open source Bonita
Open Solution, which combines three solutions in one: an innovative
process design studio, a powerful BPM engine and a breakthrough end user
interface. Bonita's graphical tool is simple to use, allowing drag and
drop from a palette into an editor window called a whiteboard. After
dropping components onto the whiteboard, you can configure each component
individually according to business-process requirements...

Although BPM standardization is not yet complete, it is progressing.
I am confident that within a few years, BPM will cover all workflow
features, common or uncommon, so that standardized BPM training will
become part of the IT curriculum, and product-specific ERP training will
no longer be an issue..."

The Steering Committee of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee
(FGDC) has officially endorsed sixty-four standards in accordance with
the FGDC Policy on Recognition of Non-Federally Authored Geographic
Information Standards and Specifications. These standards play an
important role in enabling interoperability. Included are standards
from the Open Geospatial Consortium; ISO Technical Committee 211,
Geographic information/Geomatics; the American National Standards
Institute (through International Committee for Information Technology
Standards Technical Committee L1, Geographic information systems) and
de facto standards.

FGDC is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development,
use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis.
This nationwide data publishing effort is known as the National Spatial
Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The NSDI is a physical, organizational, and
virtual network designed to enable the development and sharing of
digital geographic information resources.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) reported that a group of OGC
standards along with other standards developed externally to FGDC has
been recognized. These standards play an important role in enabling
interoperability as part of the Geospatial Platform for GeoOneStop,
place-based initiatives, and other potential future programs of the
FGDC. Ivan DeLoatch, Executive Director of the FGDC: 'OGC's interface
and encoding standards are an essential part of the National Spatial
Data Infrastructure. They play a key role in providing technical
interoperability among geospatial systems used at all levels of
government...we encourage government agencies to include these standards,
as well as FGDC's data standards, in the language of software and data
procurement documents'...

Among standards produced by OGC: (1) 'Geographic information - Geographic
Markup Language, applicable to the development of systems that have
requirements to access or distribute geospatial data using the
Extensible Markup Language (XML). (2) OpenGIS Web Feature Service
Implementation Specification, applicable to the development of systems
that have requirements to access or distribute geospatial feature data
over a network. (3) OpenGIS Filter Encoding Implementation Specification,
where a filter expression is a construct used to constrain the property
values of an object type for the purpose of identifying a subset of object
instances to be operated upon in some manner. This specification describes
an XML encoding of the OGC Common Catalog Query Language (CQL) as a
system neutral representation of a query predicate. Using the numerous
XML tools available today, such an XML representation can be easily
validated, parsed and then transformed into whatever target language is
required to retrieve or modify object instances stored in some a
persistent object store..."

Members of the Apache CXF Development Team have announced the release
of CXF 2.3.0 with significant new functionality. Apache CXF is "an open
source services framework. CXF helps you build and develop services
using frontend programming APIs like JAX-WS and JAX-RS. These services
can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP,
or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or
JBI.

CXF includes a broad feature set, but it is primarily focused on the
following areas: (1) Web Services Standards Support: CXF supports a
variety of web service standards including SOAP, the WSI Basic Profile,
WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security,
WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation. (2) REST based
service creation based on JAX-RS 1.1 standard API's. (3) Frontends:
CXF supports a variety of 'frontend' programming models. CXF provides
a JAX-WS 2.2 Compliant frontend. It also includes a 'simple frontend'
which allows creation of clients and endpoints without annotations.
CXF supports both contract first development with WSDL and code first
development starting from Java. (4) Ease of use: CXF is designed to be
intuitive and easy to use. There are simple APIs to quickly build
code-first services, Maven plug-ins to make tooling integration easy,
JAX-WS API support, Spring XML support to make configuration a snap,
and much more.

CXF 2.3.0 now provides a SOAP/JMS spec implementation. While CXF has
supported SOAP over JMS since 2.0, there wasn't a standard specification
to describe how it should be done so different vendors did things
differently and interoperability was impossible. The new SOAP/JMS
specification support implements the new SOAP/JMS spec to achieve a
higher degree of interoperability. Release 2.3.0 supports SDO
databinding, as well ass Schema Validation support for Aegis Databinding
if Woodstox 4 is used for the Stax parser...

CXF Release 2.3.0 is now JAX-WS 2.2 Compliant (passes TCK), and JAX-RS
1.1 Compliant. There are new annotations for Java first use cases to
reduce the need for external configuration and provide more control
over the runtime and generated WSDL ('@WSDLDocumentation' annotation
to add documentation nodes to generated wsdl '@SchemaValidation'
annotation to turn on schema validation '@DataBinding' to set the
databinding used — if other than JAXB '@GZIP' to turn on GZIP
compression '@FastInfoset' to turn on FastInfoset support '@Logging'
to turn on and control various Logging functionality
'@EndpointProperty' to configure endpoint properties '@Policy' to
associate WS-Policy documents with the service)..."